


Radioactive

by latbfan



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 03:35:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3795178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/latbfan/pseuds/latbfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Expanded/Missing scene at Claire's friend's apartment from the beginning of "In the Blood" (1.4), or my squinty-interpretation of subtle clues that make me think something kind of sexy may have happened before Claire started sewing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Radioactive

**Author's Note:**

> I have been thinking a lot about Claire, about the kind of person she must be to make some of the choices she has. Here's my (current) working theory.
> 
> I upped the rating to M. I assume we're all grown-ups here (please don't tell me if you're not), but I will tell you that while there isn't exactly 'shippy, smutty deliciousness (this is supposed to be canonland, after all), this installment does contain descriptions of grown-up variety unpleasantness and maybe just a touch of other niceties that aren't intended for young eyes.

Claire steals a glace at the clock and groans. She wishes she were still sleeping. If he comes, it won't be until later. Much later. Not that she's doing anything more to arrange her life for him. She just knows from experience there's no sense in trying to get away from nocturnal habits, not for only a day or two of forced staycation while he sorts out the Russians.

That sounds insane, even when the words stay safely and silently inside her head. She's hiding out, waiting for a blind, masked vigilante-type to sort out some Russian mobsters so it's safe for her to go home. Only in New York.

She reaches for a tissue and blows her nose, ruefully shaking her head because she had to call in fake sick for this little side-show, but if she stays in this cat-hair infested apartment much longer, she really will be.

Claire closes her eyes and turns to her memories of the Battle of New York the way she assumes teenage boys sift through mental catalogs of beautiful women when they're lying in their beds, trying to sleep. Not that she gets off on the carnage, nothing like that. She is many things that would make her grandmother cross herself and start up with the rosary, but monster isn't one of them. No, she just finds the clarity that only comes in a crisis soothing. Not that she would ever admit that to anyone. They'd nod like they understand, maybe, if she described the peaceful sense of really being alive and having a purpose that inevitably accompanies her heightened awareness when all hell has broken loose. Then they'd walk away and never look at her again.

But something tells her he would get it. Him. Mike. Trouble with a capital T with his bruised knuckles and his heart-breaker smile. Something tells her he would know exactly what she was talking about.

She doesn't mind that he didn't tell her his name. At least he hasn't lied to her yet. But no. She's not thinking about him right now. She's going to relax and go back to sleep.

When the portal opened over Hell's Kitchen, Claire was showering in the staff room at the hospital, washing off the sweat and grime of another double-shift before she headed home. When the frantic call for all-hands-on-deck blasted from the speaker, she threw on clean scrubs without toweling off and pulled back her wet hair as she ran to the ER. The TVs had all tuned into live coverage of the city being blown apart. More specifically, this neighborhood. A beam of light rained down warrior aliens from the sky as people stood there with open mouths and stared in stunned disbelief. But already the wounded were coming in.

"I can't ask you to say," the head of the ER had said when she saw Claire.

Claire rolled her eyes, and there was a nod and a grim smile in response.

"Run triage," she said. "No one sorts 'em like you."

Claire stuffed her pockets with latex gloves and got to work.

Broken bones, go over there. Head injuries, over there. Surface wounds, wait there. Possible internal bleeding, over to the ultrasounds.

In a lot of ways, Claire missed the Battle even though she was close enough to taste the dust of destruction and the tang of leached chemicals on her tongue. She only saw the patient directly in front of her. And then the next one. And the one after that. Over and over, one after another, until everything else disappeared and time ceased to exist and there was only her wading through a sea of never-ending, present tense injuries.

Some of the people who surged into the hospital weren't hurt, not physically at least, but still they came, seeking sanctuary as aliens, actual, for-real, motherfucking aliens, not to mention dragon-looking things, and then the super-heroes who ended up saving the day, swooped through the sky and buildings spewed concrete and steel and broken glass. She was too focused on the person in front of her to look out the window to see for herself the alien army and the pet dragons they brought along to battle. She was calm and systematic and thorough as she marshaled supplies and gave orders and decided the immediate fate of the wounded brought before her.

Like the nurses and staff sent to help from other areas of the hospital, she pressed civilians into duty, the ones with any kind of medical training or who were in the ER only because they didn't know where else to go. No one with able hands stood idle. Not while she was on watch. There were lost kids and disoriented old people to shepherd to the chapel for the priests and social workers to sort out and bottles of water to pass out and smaller cuts to clean and bandage and endless trips to the supply closet for disinfectant and adhesive glue and gloves as Claire tried to keep from cross-contaminating her patients. The ambulances kept arriving, and neighbors carried in make-shift stretchers, and complete strangers staggered in under the weight of each other in the chaos of the attack.

That's the beauty of moments like that, the peace she's desperate to recapture and hold onto as she sighs and shifts and tries to go back to sleep on borrowed sheets that make her eyes sting. She appreciates the way people come together in a crisis. Rich or poor, black or white, male or female or both or neither, none of that matters because, during the Battle, they were all just people. There's no room for petty egos, hospital politics be damned, and everyone forgets, at least temporarily, the things they want to do or the person they wish they could be. You just step the fuck up and get the job done and know when to stay out of the way for someone else. "Minor laceration, there;" "dislocated shoulder, there;" "crushed pelvis, there."

Blood is blood, and Claire wishes more things were that simple.

She tosses and turns in her friend's bed that leaves her skin feeling hot and tight and itchy. She saw him on the news, the kid Mike saved. The Russians certainly picked a cute one, with those big eyes and dark ringlets. In the resilient way of children, he even grinned for the cameras when he explained how nice man in the black mask was. He offered shadow punches and sound-effects as he told of the crashes and blows he heard behind the locked door, how the nice man carried him through the hallway of beat up bad guys and took him home. He spoke of Mike with awe in his voice, unwavering in his unspoken, innocent conviction that he was saved by an Angel sent to protect him. People assumed the poor kid was terrified and dehydrated and hallucinating, but Claire wouldn't put a hallway full of Russian mobsters past him.

Claire stayed awake all that night, waiting for Mike, but he never showed. She wonders how much blood he lost as payment for returning that little boy to his dad. He was in no condition to do anything more taxing than laying on a sofa, not after losing all that blood and the row of fresh stitches she put in his abdominal wall. She isn't sure how he walked away from that rooftop without injuring himself, let alone carried a child home or fought through a hallway of Russians mobsters. Then again, there's a reason she decided to call him Mike, and it isn't lying scumbag Mike O'Connell, like she told him. She still doesn't know why she said that when she was thinking about St. Michael as he laid there bleeding onto her couch. St. Michael was the angel who led the charge during the battle for heaven and drove Lucifer and the fallen angels to the gates of hell. She knows that much from Sundays at her grandmother's and the hours she spent amusing herself with the richly illustrated guide to the saints and martyrs. St. Michael, Mike, defender of the faithful against the forces of evil. Protector of the people. Yeah, he's a Mike all right.

And even before she knew their world had things like mystical alien hammers and big green monsters and guys who got turned into freedom-defending beefcakes, she would've believed Mike when he said he could tell when people are lying. Because she can too. Claire sees the white-hot, radioactive center of the things that matter. She nods along and pays lip service to the lies people tell her in the curtained off exam areas of the ER while her fingers find the truth of what really happened in the clotted blood or the torn muscle or the swelling jaw. People lie all the time, for all kinds of reasons, but bodies don't. They always reveal their secrets if you know what you're feeling for.

Claire knows when a kid broke his collar bone actually falling down the stairs, which absolutely sometimes happens, and when his mom or dad likes to smack him around and got carried away. She can feel the truth in the broken bone. So maybe to Mike, lies smell different or sound different. She's certainly not going to judge.

She hopes he knows she wasn't judging him right before he left, that she was lying when said she didn't believe him when he dangled the cop over the roof and said he liked it. She called someone she knows at the ICU to get the scoop on the guy. He's in a coma with machines keeping him alive, and she's not losing any sleep over her part in it. She didn't even feel guilty when the nurse mentioned the stab wound to the eye she told Mike exactly how to inflict. He's blind and could have accidentally lobotomized the guy, for fuck's sake, and still, she doesn't feel badly. She only feels badly because she doesn't feel badly, and she suspects that's more her grandmother's conscious than any part of hers.

She's seen too much working nights in the ER. She's seen exactly what depths people will stoop to in order to hurt each other, the stabbings and the shootings and all the other sharp, awful, ugly things that go bump in the night and find their way to the ER. Claire calls in the counselors when she's done piecing the bodies back together because that's hospital protocol, but she understands the futility of it. She wanted that dirty cop to scream in agony because she knows he was telling the truth: there will always be another bloody body, another broken heart, another lost soul. She will never stop patching up the people this merciless city preys upon and spits out and leaves for dead, and it will never end. There will always be another victim. And another. And another one after that.

She treats each patient with the skilled but impersonal compassion she would want if she were in their shoes and gets some satisfaction that at least the broken bone is set or the skin stitched back together or the infection staved off. She tells herself the things she does to help heal their bodies matters, is the only thing that matters in the present tense of the crisis at hand, and doesn't let herself think beyond that. If she stopped looking at the wound right in front of her, if she dared to catch a glimpse of the vastness of the dark corners where danger lurks, waiting, always waiting for the next opportunity to strike, she knows she would give up. And that is simply not an option.

She thinks maybe that's at least part of why Mike puts on a mask to beat back the darkness and save just one boy. And then another. And another one after that. She doesn't know any of the details, of course. He doesn't want her to. But she suspects Mike's a man who knows first-hand that there's only so much the law can do. A restraining order is the same as any other piece of paper. When it's dark and you're backed into a corner and fighting for your life, a piece of paper doesn't change anything. A piece of paper can't save you. But a good man who puts on a mask can.

And Mike is a good man. She knows that as surely as any other truth she's ever felt burn its way into her bones. She hopes he isn't lying awake feeling guilty about that asshole he dropped into a coma. The cop made his choice, and he chose to be on the side of the devils who snatch the kids, rather than the angels who protect them. He got what was coming to him. She just wishes she knew what kind of shape Mike was in after he set things right.

He's fine, she tells herself. He's fine because he knows where she is, and he hasn't come by. He wouldn't need to unless he was hurt. It's not like they're friends. Sure, she doesn't understand how he could escape a hallway full of angry Russian mobsters lying in wait for him without getting hurt, but she doesn't get how he did that thing with the fire extinguisher either. The world is full of mysteries that defy explanation. Like how she can't stop herself from imagining dipping the tip of her tongue into one of his dimples, tasting the rasp of his stubble over the softness of his skin.

Claire groans aloud and feels her face flush with shame because she is such a cliché. The man is goddamn hero, and she's lying here, thinking about how that mask may as well be shining a spotlight on the lush poutiness of his lips. She's lusting after him like a teenage fangirl because of his movie-star good looks. She's better than this!

Oh, but he is beautiful. She's seen what he's capable of, felt the rage roiling off of him in furious waves, seen him strike another man's face with lightening speed, watched in horror as he threw that same man off the roof. But he's more than that. He's sweet, too. That irrepressible smile, how quick he is to laugh. The way he says her name so it sounds like a caress.

His knuckles were rough and calloused, but when she pulled off his gloves in her apartment, the pads of his fingertips were so soft. They're sensitive, too. She knows they must be, the way he touches things in order to see.

Claire pulls off her tank top and drapes it over her face and tries to feel what he would if he were with her right now in this borrowed bed. Her fingertips aren't anything like his. Hers are cracked from constant washing with strong soap. No amount of lotioning can ever replace the stripped moisture. The rough skin catches as she glides her hands across her body, not sliding smoothly like his would. But she feels how warm she is. Her skin is on fire, her breath caching in her throat as she brushes shy fingers against a single nipple, like it was an accident. She pinches it then, harder than she normally would, and she gasps against the little bite of pain before soothing it away with the heel of her hand.

She moves up to her neck, feels her heartbeat pounding beneath her fingers, before she moves down again. She forces herself to go slowly, to savor even though she knows her own body well, because he would take his time. His fingertips would drink her in, not want to miss a single, insignificant corner of her. He would run his fingers over all of her, exploring every curve and crevice. He would tease around her nipples, denying her the touch she craved, not allowing her to rush him, and smile when he dipped his tongue into her belly button. He'd find the scar on her hip and pillow his head on her thigh while she told him the story of how she got it.

He would be silken skin stretched over taut muscle. Playful teasing and hungry, sensual need. In another man, maybe this would seem like a contradiction. But not in him. Claire knows he is as deliciously complex as cayenne pepper sprinkled into creamy hot chocolate: sweet on the front end with flames of heat licking down her throat on the back end. He is both a warrior and a savior, a lover and a fighter. And Claire wants all of him. She wants the good Catholic boy worshiping her body and the restrained power of the masked vigilante taking exactly what he wants without mercy. She wants to taste every sharp contrast, lick the salt from his skin, and drag her fingernails down his back because she likes the idea of leaving her mark on him.

"Please," she would beg when it got to be too much, those pornographic fingers ghosting over her, teasing her until he is all she knows, all she feels, all she wants.

He would blow cold air across her sensitized skin, overwhelming her with sensation.

"Please."

He would laugh then, low and content, and kiss his way down until he was nestled between her thighs. His beard would be rough against her skin, but his tongue would be silken, obscene promises. His mouth's wetness would join hers until she was sodden, dripping and aching and needing him, all of him, only him. More.

Claire arches her back and feels her damp heat through her boxer shorts. She teases her clit with the fabric, denies herself what she wants. Her hips move of their own volition, seeking more than what she's given them. He would smile at her greediness, refuse to be hurried. She tries to hold off, lets the pressure mount, but she can't. She needs...

God help her, she needs him.

Not able to resist any longer, she pushes down her shorts, buries two fingers she wishes belonged to someone else while her thumb works her into a writhing, wanton frenzy.

"Oh God!" she moans aloud as she rides out the best orgasm she's had in a long time. Maybe even forever.

"Oh. God." She greedily sucks air into her lungs, wets her dry lips with her tongue, and slowly opens her eyes only to remember she put her shirt over her face.

"God," she says again, tossing aside her top. It's as good a name as any to call him, really.

Her breathing slowly starts to even out, and she smiles and lets out a little guilty giggle as she rolls over, happily spent. She will have to see about finding clean sheets. Later. Maybe now she can go back to sleep after all. But she's only just closed her eyes when she hears it, a soft but persistent tapping on the glass.

Bemoaning her lost afterglow, Claire adjusts her clothes and peers around the door into the living room. She can't stop from gasping when she sees him waiting on the fire escape. This is a coincidence, surely. He wasn't sitting out there, listening to her finger-fuck herself, politely waiting for her to get off before knocking. But any hope she may have harbored that he didn't know what she'd been doing and had intentionally not interrupted vanishes when he tears the mask away from his face and delicately sniffs the air.

"Claire."

He stands close, only just not touching her, close enough to feel the heat from his body through her thin pajamas. Slowly, so slowly it's as if he's giving her all the time in the world to back away, he reaches for her hand. His gloves are rough against her wrist, but he holds her lightly, just a circle of thumb and middle finger. He brings her hand to his face and breathes deeply, moving her fingers to his nose until his stubble tickles and sends goosebumps up her arm.

He closes his eyes, the pink tip of his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip, and he sways just a bit, pulling her between his legs.

"Claire," he whispers again, his breath warm against her hand. He tosses aside his gloves and raises a bared hand to her face. "May I?" he asks, his hand hovering while he waits for her permission.

"God, yes," she breathes. "Please."

He smiles then, dark and dirty, and cups her chin. His thumb is lazy as it strokes along her cheekbone, brushes the tip of her nose. He traces her top lip as softly as a kiss, but pushes just a little harder on the bottom. She nips it, can't stop herself, and sucks it into her mouth. His thumb is as soft as she remembers, and she swirls the tip with her tongue.

"Claire," he says again.

"I've been thinking about you," she confesses.

His face breaks into a wide, satisfied smile then. He once again closes his eyes and breathes deeply through his nose. She wonders what she smells like right after she comes to a man who smells cologne three floors down.

Oh Jesus. He's smelling her come. 

"I mean the Russians," she hastily adds, taking a step back. His hand lingers in the air for just a second too long, as if he's hoping she'll come back, but the spell is broken. Dammit, she is not stupid. She knows better. What is wrong with her? "I saw the boy you saved on the news."

He tilts his head, and she thinks he's studying her even though his gaze is fixed somewhere just beyond her ear. It should be disquieting, how he's not-quite looking at her, but somehow it's not. Maybe because she knows he sees so much even when he's not looking.

God, he has beautiful eyes. She wonders what his eyelashes taste like.

He smiles then, as if he's deciding whether or not to bust her for lying so badly and obviously. That cocky grin tells her he knows precisely when her mind landed back in the gutter, and he licks his lips again, raises an eyebrow as her breath catches in her throat.

"Claire?"

No. No no and no. She doesn't even know his name.

"He said you carried him through a hallway full of unconscious Russians."

Still grinning, he shrugs as if to say, 'Subtle subject change there' or maybe 'No biggie,' but he grimaces when he moves his shoulder. It's a just a flash of pain before his face returns to the pleasant, cheerful grin, but he's hurt. That's why he came tonight, because he needs her, as in needs her first-aide skills and not anything else, and here she is, practically rubbing against him like a cat in heat. She absolutely knows better.

"Mike," she says, hoping he hears the apology in her voice. She steps back so she can see more of him. "You're hurt. You should have said something."

"Well, I was distracted," he says, his voice low and rumbly and entirely unapologetic. "It's just a scratch. I wasn't going to bother you, but I couldn't get all the glass out."

"Glass?" she asks, all business when she sees the wet tear in his shirt.

"I got the big pieces," he says with a grin.

Trouble, she reminds herself. This man is Trouble with a capital T.

"Take off your shirt," she orders as she steps around him and heads for the kitchen sink to wash her hands. "Have a seat." She opens her bag and pulls on a pair of gloves. "Jesus, Mike." Her fingers are gentle as she probes the edges of the ugly gash. "This is not a scratch."

"It's a Russian scratch."

"I can't feel any glass," she tells him.

"They're there," he says. "Shards. At least four, maybe five." He closes his eyes and tilts his head and listens. "Yeah, I still can't tell for sure."

"I will take your word on that." She pulls a syringe and a vial out of the bag.

"Whoa," he says, sounding alarmed for the first time. "What's that?"

"Lidocaine. You were unconscious last time. But I can't flush glass out of your shoulder and then stitch it back together without numbing you first."

"No," he insists. "No drugs."

"Mike," she begins.

"I'm serious, Claire. This is a deal-breaker. I appreciate all you're doing, I really do, but I will walk out of here and take care of it myself if you insist."

She sets down the supplies and rubs her face with her forearm. "How will you take care of it yourself?" she asks.

"I can't not feel everything," he whispers, like he's sharing a shameful secret. "Not right now. I need to feel. Claire."

"It's going to hurt like a sonofabitch, you know that right?"

"I'm tougher than I look." She sighs and leans back in her chair. "Claire," he says again. "Please." Her resolving is wavering. "Please."

"Have it your way," she finally concedes.

"Thank you, Claire."

He reaches forward and brushes just the tips of his fingers against her cheek. She wonders if he says her name so often to make up for the fact that she can't say his at all. Or maybe he can tell she likes the way it sounds when he says it. Then he smiles that same easy smile even though she can only imagine how much the deep cut full of glass shards hurts. He leans back again, loose-limbed in the chair, as relaxed as if they were about to sit down to dinner.

"You're kind of a weird guy, Mike," she says as she holds a towel under the cut to catch the saline as she irrigates the wound, hoping to wash out the glass rather than go on a tweezer expedition for pieces too small to see.

"Does that bother you?" he quietly asks.

She has no intention of answering that one, and she's about to say as much when he cups her elbow in his resting left hand. There's really no use denying the way she feels his touch somewhere else entirely, somewhere much lower and extremely unprofessional. He grins and tips his head, mischievous and sweet, like he can't quite believe he's getting away with something so bold. It doesn't hamper her movements, though, his fingers softly stroking the sensitive skin of her inner arm, so she doesn't tell him to stop.

"How's that feel?" she finally asks.

He closes his eyes again and shifts his shoulder this way and that, the movement causing more blood to seep down his chest. While she waits for the verdict, she looks over the incisions from before. He's healed remarkably fast. No sign of inflammation or infection. The reddest part of him is not the knife-wound in his side, as she would have expected, but his nipples. She swallows around the terrible-idea of leaning forward and sucking one into her mouth, just to see if he tastes like she imagines, and focuses instead on the rippling muscles as he steadily breathes in and out.

"Yeah," he says. "You got it all."

"You positive?"

"Yes," he says with a definitive head nod.

"Because I don't want to sew you up only to have to rip it all out to fish out glass shards."

He leans forward, squeezing her elbow firmly, and is so close she can feel his breath on her lips. "You've very good," he says. He sits back without kissing her, and it's really all for the best, she tells herself, because she has work to do. And she knows better.

She sets aside the ruined towel and rummages in her bag for a suture kit. She tries not to notice how his hand hangs in space, waiting to hold her elbow again. She tries to pretend she doesn't need his fingers on her elbow, soothing her as she sews, as if he knows exactly how hard it will be for her to hurt him and he wants to make her feel better about it.

"I hope to God you've had your tetanus shot," she says instead of trying to convince him to let her numb him. She rests her elbow in his open palm like that's exactly where it's supposed to be, takes a deep breath, and slides the needle into his skin.

"What do you think I am?" he teases. "Some kind of martyr?"

"Well, you have been busy."

**Author's Note:**

> These stories have been coming fast and furious, but I'm about to bugger off and deal with house guests. But I will be back. Promise.


End file.
